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Claude Code is being dumbed down?

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Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?

#641

Post by whodidntante »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #429
bcherny wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think folks might be crossing wires a bit. To make it so you can see full file paths, we repurposed verbose mode to enable the old explicit file output, while hiding more details behind ctrl+o. In effect, we've evolved verbose mode to be multi-state, so that it lets you toggle back to the old behavior while giving you a way to see even more verbose output, while still defaulting everyone else to the condensed view.…

Honestly, I just want to be able to control precisely what I see via config.json. It will probably differ depending on the project. This is a developer tool, I don't see why you'd shy away from providing granular configuration (alongside reasonable defaults). I actually miss being able to see all of the thinking, for example, because I could tell more quickly when the model was making a wrong assumption and intervene…

ok, I will be the dumbass here - I am a retired software engineer who has not used any of these tools, but when I as working on high volume web sites, all I wanted and needed was access to the log files. I would always have a small terminal session open to tail and grep for errors for the areas I was interested in. Had another small window to tail and monitor specific performance values. Etc.

I do not know how this concept would work in these agentic environments, but would seem useful, in an environment that has a lot of parallel things going on, with a lot of metrics that could be useful, you would want to have multiple monitors that can be quickly customized with standard linux utilities. Token usage, critical directory access, etc.

This, in conjunction with a config file to define/filter out the log stream should be all that's needed to provide as much or as little detail that would be needed to monitor how things are going, and to alert when certain things are going off the rails.

Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?

#642

Post by Wowfunhappy »

bibabaloo wrote: post #574
2001zhaozhao wrote: post #507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At some point we need to start preferring GUIs instead of terminals as the AI starts giving us more and more information. Features like hover-over tooltips and toggle switches designed for mouse operation might really start to matter. Maybe "AI IDEs" will gain ground in the future, e.g. vibe-kanban

Yes I don't understand why Claude code needs to be a terminal app. It doesn't compose with any other command line program and the terminal interface is limiting. I'm surprised nobody has yet made a coding assistant that runs in the browser or as a standalone app. At this point it doesn't really need to integrate with my text editor or IDE.

> It doesn't compose with any other command line program

For what it's worth, it absolutely can, just not when invoked in interactive mode.

(This doesn't really contradict your overall point though.)

Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?

#643

Post by troupo »

bcherny wrote: post #386

Hey, Boris from the Claude Code team here. I wanted to take a sec to explain the context for this change. One of the hard things about building a product on an LLM is that the model frequently changes underneath you. Since we introduced Claude Code almost a year ago, Claude has gotten more intelligent, it runs for longer periods of time, and it is able to more agentically use more tools. This is one of the magical th…

> Opus 4.6 1-shots much of my code, often running for minutes, hours, and days at a time.

This is verifiable bullshit. Unless you explicitly explain how it "runs for days" since Opus's context window is incapable of handling even relatively large CLAUDE.md files.

> The amount of output this generates can quickly become overwhelming in a terminal, and is something we hear often from users. Terminals give us relatively few pixels to play with; they have a single font size; colors are not uniformly supported; in some terminal emulators, rendering is extremely slow.

No. It's your incapability as an engineer that limits this. And you and your engineers getting high on your own supply. Hence you need 16ms to draw a couple of characters on screen and call it a tiny game engine [1] For which your team was rightfully ridiculed.

> But we missed the mark for a subset of our users. To improve it,

AI-written corporate nothingspeak.

[1] https://x.com/trq212/status/2014051501786931427

Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?

#644

Post by troupo »

bcherny wrote: post #419
extr wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW I mentioned this in the thread (I am the guy in the big GH issue who actually used verbose mode and gave specific likes/dislikes), but I find it frustrating that ctrl+o still seems to truncate at strange boundaries. I am looking at an open CC session right now with verbose mode enabled - works pretty well and I'm glad you're fixing the subagent thing. But when I hit ctrl+o, I only see more detailed output for th…

Yes totally. ctrl+o used to show all messages, but this is one of the tricky things about building in a terminal: because many terminals are quite slow, it is hard to render a large amount of output at once without causing tearing/stutter. That said, we recently rewrote our renderer to make it much more efficient, so we can bump up the default a bit. Let me see what it feels like to show the last 10-20 messages -- fi…

> because many terminals are quite slow, it is hard to render a large amount of output at once without causing tearing/stutter.

Only if you use React as your terminal renderer. You're not rendering 10k objects on screen in a few milliseconds. You're outputting at best a few thousand characters. Even the slowest terminal renderer is capable of doing that.

Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?

#645

Post by Wowfunhappy »

insanedeisgn wrote: post #613
bcherny wrote: post #386

Hey, Boris from the Claude Code team here. I wanted to take a sec to explain the context for this change. One of the hard things about building a product on an LLM is that the model frequently changes underneath you. Since we introduced Claude Code almost a year ago, Claude has gotten more intelligent, it runs for longer periods of time, and it is able to more agentically use more tools. This is one of the magical th…

[flagged]

On the contrary, I feel like most AI products aimed at non-programmers haven't really set the world on fire, with the exception of the basic chatbot interface (ie ChatGPT).

Focusing on programmers seems to have really worked for Anthropic. (And they do also have Claude Cowork).

Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?

#646

Post by troupo »

bombela wrote: post #488
bcherny wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes totally. ctrl+o used to show all messages, but this is one of the tricky things about building in a terminal: because many terminals are quite slow, it is hard to render a large amount of output at once without causing tearing/stutter. That said, we recently rewrote our renderer to make it much more efficient, so we can bump up the default a bit. Let me see what it feels like to show the last 10-20 messages -- fi…

Just tell people to install a fast terminal if they somehow happen to have a slow one? Heck, simply handle the scrolling yourself a la tmux/screen and only update the output at most every 4ms? It's so trivial, can't you ask your fancy LLM to do it for you? Or you guys lost the plot at his point and forgot the most basics of writing non pessimized code.

> It's so trivial, can't you ask your fancy LLM to do it for you?

They did. And the result was a React render loop that takes 16ms to output a hundred characters to screen and tells them it will take a year to rewrite: https://x.com/trq212/status/2014051501786931427

Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?

#647

Post by troupo »

SPICLK2 wrote: post #618
sigmarule wrote: post #614

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe he is speaking of the effective resolution of TUIs, not pty throughput rates or fps, though I do agree with what you’re actually getting it.

From the list of problems they are experiencing with rendering in the terminal, it sounds like they want a GUI (Electron would be a good fit).

> From the list of problems they are experiencing with rendering in the terminal, it sounds like they want a GUI (Electron would be a good fit).

Electron? The tech that is literally incapable of rendering large amounts of anything, including text, quickly?

Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?

#648

Post by troupo »

2001zhaozhao wrote: post #507
bcherny wrote: post #386

Hey, Boris from the Claude Code team here. I wanted to take a sec to explain the context for this change. One of the hard things about building a product on an LLM is that the model frequently changes underneath you. Since we introduced Claude Code almost a year ago, Claude has gotten more intelligent, it runs for longer periods of time, and it is able to more agentically use more tools. This is one of the magical th…

At some point we need to start preferring GUIs instead of terminals as the AI starts giving us more and more information. Features like hover-over tooltips and toggle switches designed for mouse operation might really start to matter. Maybe "AI IDEs" will gain ground in the future, e.g. vibe-kanban

We could do complicated UIs in terminals in the 1990s.

Unfortunately, vibe coders cannot do that anymore.

Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?

#649

Post by topherhunt »

bostonvaulter2 wrote: post #504
dinp wrote: post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought I was the only person going crazy by the new default behavior not showing the file names! Please don't expect users to understand your product details and config options in such detail, it was working well before, let it remain. Or at least show some message like "to view file names, do xyz" in the ui for a few days after such a change. While we're here, another thing that's annoying: the token counter. Whi…

> Another thing: is it possible to turn off the words like finagling and similar (I can't remember the spelling of any of them) ? Big +1 on that. I find the names needlessly distracting. I want to just always say a single thing like “thinking”

I replaced my spinner verbs with thought-provoking Yodaese so my claude sessions are constantly making me think about my life decisions. Loving it. https://gist.github.com/topherhunt/b7fa7b915d6ee3a7998363d12...

Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?

#650

Post by jwr »

titanomachy wrote: post #610
jwr wrote: post #75

I really dislike this trend that unfortunately has become, well, a trend. And has followers. Namely, let's simplify to "reduce noise" and "not overwhelm users", because "the majority of users don't need…". This is spreading like a plague: browser address bars are being trimmed down to nothing. Good luck figuring out which protocol you're using, or soon which website you are talking to. The TLS/SSL padlock is gone, so…

The TLS thing at least kind of makes sense. 99.9% of sites that the typical user visits will have a correctly configured and trusted certificate and communicate over TLS, so the browsers only show an indicator when that’s not the case. I think it’s a sensible evolution given how the internet has changed.

Again with the "99.9%" argument. This is always the beginning of a path towards dumbing things down. "99% of users…, 99% of sites…, in 99% of cases…" — this is always how these things begin.

Also, was the padlock really such a problem? Did it really have to be removed? If not, perhaps another easily accessible way to access this data could be invented. Like, I don't know, a menu item perhaps?

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